We have identified our source LUNs and created our target XtremIO volumes

For our BOOT from SAN LUNs, we do not need these to be incremental SANcopy sessions as they are only 30GB in size each. To cutover the boot LUN, we will do the following:

Place the host maintenance mode to evacuate any/all VMs on the host

Shutdown the host

Start the SANcopy session

Once complete, remove the source volume from the VNX host storage group

Map the boot volume to the VMware host as HLU 0 on the XtremIO

Adjust host boot from SAN policy (in my case, I am working with UCS hosts)

Boot host and verify successful boot

Exit maintenance mode

The SANcopy session can be created in either the VNX GUI or CLI using naviseccli. You will need to know the following: source LUN name (or ID), source LUN GUID (wwn), target XtremIO FC ports, target volume mapped HLU # to the VNX initiator group.

As you see here, I mapped host 1’s target boot volume as HLU 1 to the VNX initiator group. (Host 2 mapped as HLU 2, etc.) I decided to create my SANcopy sessions in the CLI as I have about 40 host boot LUN sessions to create.

While scripting out my session create commands, I am alternating between SCs and ports on the XtremIO to balance the load out.

As for our incremental sessions, we need to create a Reserved LUN Pool that the incremental sessions will use. For that we will follow EMC best practices and create our incremental sessions accordingly. More to come on that soon!

In continuing with part 2 of this series, I’m going to discuss zoning requirements for SANcopy on the XtremIO. To recap before we begin, I have a VMware environment that I am migrating from VNX to XtremIO. Most of this environment can be migrated via storage vMotion to the XtremIO. However, there are quite a few of VMs that have physical mode RDMs that need to be migrated via SANcopy. We chose SANcopy over Open Migrator because these following reasons:

SANcopy enabler is installed on the source VNX

SANcopy will require one outage to shutdown the server on time of cutover

SANcopy is array-based and would not impact the host CPU

Open Migrator is only supported for Microsoft Windows Server

Open Migrator requires three reboots to migrate (one to attach filter driver to source and target drives, two to actually cutover one drives are in sync, and three to uninstall the software)

First things first; we need to zone our target XtremIO to the source VNX. With following EMC Best Practices, we will create 1-to-1 zones on each Fabric for SP A and SP B ports to two controllers.

Fabric A

Zones

Source VNX

Target XtremIO

Zone 1

SP A-port 5

X1-SC1-FC1

Zone 2

SP A-port 5

X1-SC2-FC1

Zone 3

SP B-port 5

X1-SC1-FC1

Zone 4

SP B-port 5

X1-SC2-FC1

* SP A-port 5 and SP B-port 5 are connected to Fabric A in my environment*

Yes… yes… I know I used the acronym XIO (XIO is not XtremIO) for my fcalias and zone names. Sorry! 🙂

You can choose to split this across multiple bricks if you have more than one brick in your XtremIO cluster. Even though, you really only need to zone one storage controller at a minimum, we are choosing to zone two controllers and will split the SANcopy sessions across the two controllers to balance out the load.

Once we have our zoning in place, we should now see the VNX visible from the XtremIO. You can view this in the CLI by issuing the show-discovered-initiators-connectivity command or in the GUI by creating a new initiator group for the VNX and selecting the drop down to show the SP A and SP B WWPNs. Create a new initiator group on the XtremIO for the VNX and map the target volumes for the SANcopy session to this initiator group. Take note of the HLU you assigned to the volume mapping and also the target FC ports on the XtremIO you zoned to the VNX.

The next part of this guide will discuss what is needed on the VNX source before SANcopy sessions can be created. We are going to talk about reserved LUN pool, requirements around that, and creating the SANcopy session itself. Stay tuned!

In today’s digital age with virtualization leading the way, you will often find yourself in a situation dealing with VMs and RDMs. RDMs are Raw Device Mappings and it is a way to present a physical LUN to a VM directly as if it was accessing direct-attached storage. Often what proves to be a daunting task is the ability to migration these RDMs that are attached to VMs. I’m going to discuss how to identify which VMs have RDMs, which storage array they belong to, and map it back to the physical LUN on that storage array.

The first thing you will want to do is to scan vCenter for VMs with RDMs

You will need read access to vCenter and you should have VMware powerCLI installed on your desktop

Connect to vCenter through powerCLI

Connect-VIServer yourvcenterhostname.domain.local

Run a get-VM script selecting the VM hostname, raw device, NAA ID, and hard disk number

Once the script completes, you should have a text file that can be imported into excel as text data delimted or fixed width

Use the data filter and sort by NAA or SCSIcanonicalname

Use this and the source array collects or logs to compare and identify which pertain to your migration

In my example, I am migrating from a VNX to XtremIO. I will be using the SCSI Canonical Name and comparing that to the LUN UID/WWN from the SP collect

Example:

Once you have identified the VMs in the list that pertain to your migration, you are now ready to begin planning next steps. In my scenario, I am migrating VMs residing on a VNX to a XtremIO. There is a mixture of Virtual and Physical RDMs which means that along with Storage vMotion, I will be using SANcopy to create incremental sessions and pushing the physical RDMs to the XtremIO.

Other tools such as Open Migrator and PPME (if PowerPath is present) can be used as an alternative host-based migration approach, but each tool as its caveats and may still require a reboot to cut over. I will discuss SANcopy from VNX to XtremIO in a future post.